April's Rain
“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain...” -from The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot I. April, dragoness with scales like tarnished turquoise and brown eyes like new earth, was still not much more than a dragonet who hid behind glasses and a wilting fin, keeping her body from falling apart with a scarf wound round her thin neck like a bandage. She saw the world through two eyes, the eye of the jaded cynic and the eye of the immortal artist. All dragonkind disgusted her with their cruelty, their petty blindness, their callousness towards the suffering of their fellow dragon, the candlelight brevity of life and love. On some days life was a burden and conversation was agony, the crushing knowledge that she was no better than the ones that she despised burning heavy in her throat, bringing salt to her eyes as she feared for herself and all of her race, but mostly for herself. And so each morning she wound the scarf around her neck and set her glasses on her snout with the air of someone going to battle, plucking up what little courage she had and telling herself that it is better this way, better to forget that she is not special, that no one is special. And yet April loved and bled her love wherever she went, trailing it behind her like blood from a cut not yet healed, as if her scarf bound a gaping wound over a leaking heart. She loved everything, she loved too much, and it seemed that one of these days her heart would run out of love and she would become nothing more than the empty, bloodless shell of a SeaWing. But for now, she loved this world and all worlds with the wide-eyed wonder of a dragonet, and sometimes the beauty of it all took her breath away. She loved not just one dragon but all dragonkind, loved so passionately that she just wanted to laugh and cry with joy, and fly until gravity relinquished her and the world fell away into purest starlight. Somehow she was always drunk, addicted to life, and no matter how much she struggled the right words would never come to describe it – how her heart raced, how each breath became the sweetest agony and she knew for certain that she was real. And so on some days April drank the rain and told herself that even though everyone was going to die, she would not be ashamed to be alive. She would not let herself die of misery every day, over and over again. She would be immortal for maybe a hundred years, and then she would die all at once, and that was how it was meant to be. But it was her fatal flaw, to love too much and yet too selfishly. In a few short years she had given herself and all her love to the world. And so it was that when April met the dragoness she was going to marry, she had nothing left; when their paths first crossed and their eyes first met, April didn’t have much more love left to give from her hollow, leaking heart. Forever ensnared by the poetry of sun and sky, city and desert, she was just awakening to the other kind of immortality, the softer kind, the earthly kind, the kind to be found in another dragon’s glistening eyes. Half of the dragons that April had loved hadn’t even been real dragons of flesh and blood, but rather born of words and paper, kindled in the secret depths of her writer’s soul. In her heart they lived, and in her heart they burned. April loved them and killed them and mourned them well. They had all been perfect tragedies. April loved tragedies, and in retrospect perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that she turned her first marriage into one of those beautiful tragedies that brought her such delight to pen. She did not love Tess, yet she needed Tess near. She needed Tessellation the way that she needed life, the way she needed wind beneath her wings and words to feed her writer’s soul - all the while knowing that one day she would break herself and break Tess’s heart and drown in the rain and love every second of it. And that was the way it was meant to be, because the best stories have the bitterest ends and what was love without grief? And yet… The days crested and fell, ebbed and flowed with the tide. Each morning April woke with the sting of guilt in her brown eyes, and in the cold light of dawn she swore to herself; she would love Tessellation, she would love her without pain, she would do better this time, she would, she would, she would – II. April loved poetically, like rain, like storm. She loved in the way a hurricane loved the shore, blotting out the sun and leaving death and ruin in her wake - and once the skies fell and the clouds broke, wasn’t the cruelest kind of lover the kind that hurt you in the ways that no one else could, with eyes full of love all the while, never meaning you any harm? For all the while April’s hourglass heart was marking time, bleeding away as the hours winged by, bleeding her love out into the endless, thankless world. She was not like other dragons in that somehow she could never hold onto her love, the same way she could not hold water in her paws – it slipped away and fell like rain; silent, gentle as thunder, warm as the breath of springtime. And yet rain was endless but love was not, and so every evening April unwound her scarf and waited with bated breath for the moment when her love would finally run out. April married Tessellation the NightWing, but did not love her for who she was. Selfish SeaWing that she was, April only loved the dragoness that she imagined Tess to be; the fantasy, the dragoness destined to play a side character in the grand adventure of April’s life. Forever thinking in the third person, forever trapped on the outside looking earthwards, April never came close enough to see the flaws in her. To April, Tess was perfect. Tess would be her destiny, her tragedy. Tess came striding into her life all at once, so alive, so full of breath and blood and life, so perfectly, tangibly real. There was a fire in her eyes in and in her soul, a fire so wild and free, and not for a moment could April have imagined that she would ever have the cruel skill to trap her beauty in feeble words and paper, perhaps for fear of the paper catching flame. Even the writer’s gift, the power to frame entire universes in 26 letters, fell flat before Tessellation’s neat violet-gray paws. Tess defied language, defied definition, stood outside the bounds of everything that April knew. WIP __NOEDITSECTION__ Category:Experimental Pages